In 1840 Giuseppe Verdi was in a state of despair. His wife, Margherita Barezzi, and two children, Virginia and Icilio, had died within the space of two years. After initial success with his first opera, Oberto, his second, Un giorno di regno, had flopped: he was considering calling it quits on a career as a composer. Hope arrived, as the story goes, when he was inspired by the libretto for Nabucco and especially its now iconic chorus ‘Va pensiero’. The famous soprano Giuseppina Strepponi created the role of Abigaille, and the opera was a great success at its 1842 premiere. Nabucco was to change Verdi’s life in more ways than one.

Strepponi was a free spirit; she had been the mistress of tenor Napoleone Moriani, and the mother of three illegitimate children, none of whom survived. A relationship soon developed between Strepponi and Verdi, and in 1847 they moved in together. Their partnership lasted fifty years, until Strepponi’s death in 1897. The affair was initially complicated by the fact that the couple were not married (they eventually did so in 1859). The consequent gossip elicited harsh words from Antonio Barezzi, Verdi’s ex-father-in-law with whom he had remained very close after Margherita’s death. Verdi responded to Barezzi on 21 January 1852 in a long and defiant letter, asserting: ‘I have nothing to hide. In my house there lives a lady, free and independent… Neither I nor she is obliged to account to anyone for our actions… I claim my freedom of action, because all men have a right to it, and because my nature rebels against mere conformity’.

Verdi’s aggressive retort may be understood as yet another facet of an insurrectionist nature: he had, from the very beginning of his creative life, a well-articulated mission to escape and subvert the rigid culture of Italian opera composition and its concomitant mercantilism. The independence and strength of his relationship with Strepponi seemed to intensify that ambition, which he reiterated in a letter of 25 February 1850 to librettist Salvadore Cammarano, regarding a never fully realized opera based on Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘You know that we should… treat it in an entirely novel manner… without regard to conventions of any kind’.

Such clearly articulated personal and artistic radicalism would soon manifest itself in his choice of outré subjects and situations for the three operas written between April 1850 and March 1853. In Rigoletto (1851), a hunchback’s beautiful daughter is abducted and raped; in Il trovatore (1853), a mad gypsy’s vengeful act of throwing an infant into a fire leads to fratricide; and in La traviata (1853) a consumptive courtesan’s love for a man above her social class climaxes in a passionate reunion and a tragic death.

It wasn’t easy to move such unorthodox topics past the censors, who exercised authority over all sectors of the Italian political and cultural landscape. According to Verdi scholar David Kimball, the censors’ concerns were threefold: ‘political offence, religious offence and moral offence’. Kimball quotes the words of the prefect of the Milanese police as a useful guide for understanding state resistance to potentially explosive subject matter: ‘Theatres are designed to correct morals, and must therefore never present anything but moral themes, or, if they present vice and wickedness, it must be done in such a way that virtue appears the more glorious and beautiful as a result.’

Censorship thus frustrated the progress of all three operas, and official decisions sometimes shocked the composer. A good example is an early version of Rigoletto, called La maledizione (The Curse), which was rejected outright. Verdi, deeply distressed, immediately wrote to Carlo Marzari, president of La Fenice opera house in Venice: ‘The… decree completely banning La maledizione was so unexpected that I almost went out of my mind.’ The composer’s surprise is itself a bit surprising, since his literary source, Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse (The King Amuses Himself), about an embittered hunchback and a depraved king, had been shut down for immorality the day after its Parisian premiere in 1832. Perhaps Verdi had a bit too much confidence in his name and reputation as he flaunted taboos.

But censors weren’t only concerned about plots and characters; they also scrutinized librettos for disrespectful religious references and offensive language. An object lesson is the change in wording of the Duke’s request to Sparafucile in Act III of Rigoletto from the brazen ‘I want a room and your sister’, to the far less titillating ‘I want a room and some wine’. In the case of Trovatore, Roman censors insisted that Leonora take poison offstage, because, as impresario Vincenzo Jacovicci explained, ‘suicide is not permitted’. The intended present-day setting of La traviata caused a different set of problems. While Verdi was very pleased with Traviata, calling it ‘a subject for our own age’, censors did not look kindly on a modern and compassionate take on the subject of prostitution. Despite Verdi’s objections, the costumes for the premiere reflected a quite different era, 1700 (the setting was changed back a year later).

What seems now a capricious change of time period in Traviata also clashed with the music – specifically its tinta (colour), Verdi’s term for the unique sonority of an opera. Thus, the tinta of Traviata arises from the dances – especially the waltzes, real and implied, which evoke the ballrooms of the 19th century and not those of the 18th. In Trovatore, the tinta materializes in the clang of the Anvil Chorus, and the funereal ‘death motive’ (with its ‘short-short-long’ rhythm) that drives the ‘Miserere’ in Act III; while the so-called ‘curse motive’ of Rigoletto articulated in the opening bars of the prelude permeates the entire opera.

What lingers in the ear, however, and long after the last echo has died out in the opera house, are the heart-stopping words and melodies of all three works: Gilda’s longing for the man she knows only as Gualtier Maldè in ‘Caro nome’ (Dear name); Azucena’s grisly fireside narrative ‘Stride la vampa!’ (Raging flames!); and Violetta and Alfredo’s declaration of love ‘Di quell’amor, ch’è palpito dell’universo intero, misterioso, altero, croce e delizia al cor’ (Love that is the pulse of the entire universe, mysterious, noble, both cross and delight of the heart). It is surely these strong emotions, powerfully expressed and truly felt, that have ensured these operas’ enduring popularity.

There is a much-repeated backstage line: a bad dress rehearsal means a good first night. True, it is usually spoken more in hope than expectation. But can the reverse be true? What if it was a really good dress rehearsal? Donizetti found out the hard way in Naples in 1834, where he was about to have the premiere of his opera Maria Stuarda. It wasn't the first time – and nor would it be the last – that Donizetti fell foul of the Neapolitan censors.

Maria Stuarda's dress rehearsal went exceptionally well, what Donizetti called ‘a fanatical success’. The whole show had been commissioned, written, checked by the official censor who approved it with a few changes, and everything was made ready for the premiere. But just a day or so after, the bombshell dropped: the King refused permission for the opera to be performed.

The reason for the ban was never explained – but we can speculate. It may well have been because the opera includes a scene in which Mary receives confession and absolution. Presenting religious rites and even religious figures is a running theme in the censoring of opera in Italy in the 19th century. But equally it could have been because the first performance was intended to be a Royal Gala and the King had previously forbidden serious subjects for Royal Galas. Whatever the cause the result was the same: all that effort and money and time, but no premiere.

A year earlier, the premiere of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in Milan had been a triumph, but such success did not mean it would automatically be fine for Naples. One of the censors there was so horrified by it that he protested about it to the police, stating that ‘it ends with the death of six individuals, five of whom are poisoned at one table, where they have been enticed by the blackest perfidy disguised as polite and chivalrous hospitality’. So, not just a dangerous example of treachery among the ruling classes, but an appalling breach of manners.

Donizetti had written Pia de’ Tolomei for Venice, where it was performed in 1837; for Naples in 1838 it had to be revised to accommodate the censors’ demands. The same year, Donizetti must have felt Maria's history was repeating itself in the Naples rehearsals for his new opera Poliuto. This was based on Corneille’s play on the life of the Christian martyr St Polyeuctus and had already been approved by the official censor. But the King of Naples is reported to have said ‘Let’s leave the saints in the calendar and not put them on the stage’. And that was that.

It's no wonder that Donizetti’s next move was away from Italy to the less restrictive, more glamorous international sphere of Paris, where he arrived more than ready to turn Poliuto into a French grand opera, Les Martyrs.

By 1843, Donizetti’s success was international and his operas acclaimed. But he still had to worry about the censors for his Caterina Cornaro, written that year for Naples – even over such details as whether the censors would allow one character to wear a Maltese cross.

Of course, Naples was not the only Italian city with irritatingly intrusive censors. In a Catholic country, suicide is a mortal sin, and so was an action that could not be presented on stage anywhere in the country. As a result, Donizetti found himself required to ensure that Maria Padilla, the title role of his 1841 opera for Milan, should die at the end of the opera not through suicide but ‘of joy’.

Just as with Giuseppe Verdi, the censorship Donizetti faced in Italy was a crucial factor in shaping the works he created. The concerns of those Italian censors are not ours, yet the effects of their preoccupations remain in so many works as we know them today.

The production is a co-production with Polish National Opera, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, and is given with generous philanthropic support from Lord and Lady Laidlaw, Susan and John Singer and Michael Hartnall.

Like most art forms, opera has had its (un)fair share of censorship. Whether alarmed by onstage sex and violence or suspecting seditious sentiments (almost always imagined), censors have had their red pens at the ready from the very beginnings of opera through into the 20th century. We take a look at just four operatic masterpieces subjected to censorship.

Fidelio by Ludwig van Beethoven – first performed at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, in 1805

Beethoven's only opera first emerged less than two decades after the French Revolution. Censors saw the opera's triumphant celebration of liberty as directly inspired by the storming of the Bastille and cancelled the premiere – until it emerged that the Empress was a fan of the story, and a new premiere of 20 November 1805 was promptly arranged. Just days earlier, on 12 November, Napoleon's troops had peacefully occupied Vienna and many of the court and others interested in Beethoven's music had fled the city. The opera opened to an house full of non-German speaking French troops (in a time before surtitles). Beethoven withdrew the piece after just three performances. He went on to make significant revisions to the opera until 1818, later describing it as 'the one that cost me the worst birth-pangs, the one that brought me the most sorrow; and for that reason it is the one most dear to me'.

Donizetti planned his adaptation of Friedrich von Schiller's Maria Stuart as a vehicle for his favourite leading lady of the time, Giuseppina Ronzi de Begnis. He and his young librettist cut the cast down to six, introduced a love interest and made a thrilling dramatic centrepiece out of Schiller's (entirely fictional) showdown between the two queens. But after a successful dress rehearsal at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, the King of Naples unexpectedly banned all further performances – perhaps because his queen was a descendent of the Stuarts, or because the prospect of one queen calling another 'vil bastarda' was considered a step too far.

The composer responded to the ban by revising the work as Buondelmonte, reorienting the tale around a character from Dante's Inferno. When it eventually hit the San Carlo stage – using the same sets that had been created for Maria Stuarda – to no one's surprise, it was not a success. The celebrated soprano Maria Malibran championed a new production at La Scala, Milan, where the opera briefly became a succèss de scandale, but it was soon banned. It largely fell from the repertory, only to be rediscovered in the 1950s.

Close to the deadline for his new commission for Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Verdi had decided to recycle Eugène Scribe's 1833 libretto Gustave III, sprucing it up with his librettist Antonio Somma. The story, about the real-life assassination of an 18th-century European king, caught the attention of the Neapolitan censors, who immediately insisted the king be fictionalized, demoted to a duke and removed to a more distant past. Verdi and Somma capitulated. But when Verdi arrived for rehearsals he was presented with yet further demands: the heroine was to made the sister, not the wife of the king/duke's secretary, and the assassination was to happen offstage. Verdi absolutely refused and relations quickly broke down, leading Verdi to withdraw the Naples premiere altogether. Verdi didn't entirely get his way, however. For the opera's eventual premiere in Rome he still had to replace King Gustav with Riccardo, fictional governor of Boston.

Shostakovich's second opera was an immediate critical and popular success, and was celebrated as the first truly Soviet masterpiece. In the following two years it was performed nearly two hundred times in Moscow and Leningrad, and was exported around the world. On 26 January 1936 Stalin and a group of Soviet dignitaries attended a performance at the Bolshoi. Two days later an unremittingly damning report appeared in the government newspaper Pravda. In the editorial 'Muddle instead of Music', the author decried the opera as petty-bourgeois, 'a confused stream of sound' that 'tickles the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music'. It changed the landscape of music in the Soviet Union, establishing a new manifesto under which composers such as Shostakovich and Sergey Prokofiev, previously successful, were suddenly in fear for their lives. Lady Macbeth would not be performed again until 1962, in a significantly sanitized version, and not in its fully rehabilitated form until the late 1970s.

Maria Stuarda runs from 5-18 July 2014. Tickets are still available.Un ballo in maschera runs from 18 December 2013-17 January 2015. General booking opens on 21 October 2014.

After the 1905 premiere of Salome in Dresden, the Kaiser - otherwise a fan of the composer's work - told Richard Strauss that ‘This Salome will do you no good’. In response, Strauss quipped that 'The "no good” enabled me to build my house in Garmisch'. Such was the sensation that the piece caused with the public and the press alike, that within two years it had been staged at 50 other opera houses around Europe.

The Catholic Church had condemned the piece and the Kaiser remained unconvinced, nearly banning the opera when plans were made for a Berlin premiere. The head of the Hofoper in Berlin appealed to the authorities, suggesting that they could put the star of Bethlehem in the painted sky over the stage, giving the sense that redemption would soon be at hand. Sadly, the management had confused the various Herods in the Bible - It is Herod Antipas who appears in Salome, while it is Herod the Great whom the wise men visit and who later slaughters the innocents. Nonetheless, with this historical inaccuracy intact, the opera was finally staged in Berlin, shocking and thrilling yet another audience on its way to becoming one of the iconic 20th-century operas.

Opera began as a court entertainment. Wealthy nobility in the 17th and 18th centuries had their own theatres, composers, musicians and theatrical troupes to entertain them and their guests. So it’s not surprising that there was a good degree of flattery on stage to reflect the status of the aristocrats who paid for it all. Baroque and Classical operas are full of scenarios in which rulers are challenged, angered and betrayed. But whatever happens in the course of the story, the monarch (mythological or historical) invariably ends the work through dispensing a bit of noble forgiveness.

This type of opera was part an education in how to exercise power and part a distancing technique (‘any resemblance between those on stage and those in the audience is entirely coincidental’). It’s a pattern to be seen in such a work as Handel’s Tamerlano, and with Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus) the title gives it away! Even presenting Queen Elizabeth I in an opera written for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – as Gloriana does – has loud echoes of this.

We can easily forget today how powerful and suggestive stage works could be. Gloriana’s Act III is about the rebellious uprising led by the Earl of Essex. The uprising’s failure results in Essex’s execution on the orders of Queen Elizabeth I. It is a matter of fact that on the night before this historical event of 8 February 1601 a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II was given at The Globe theatre by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, for whom Shakespeare wrote. This was a change from the planned play – the actors were paid 40 shillings by the leading aristocratic supporters of Essex’s uprising. Significantly, it is a play about a weak king with no direct heir whose throne is usurped for the good of the country. In Elizabethan times, theatres provided one of the few places crowds could legally assemble in large numbers, and in a situation where they could be incited to mob action by rhetoric from the stage. Theatres could be dangerously political places.

It’s not surprising then that censorship of the stage became part of the government’s role. And it wasn’t just the potential for political incitement that caused concern, but increasingly anything that could corrupt public morals or offend individuals – especially the monarchy. By the early 1900s, censorship of British theatre routinely stopped any portrayal of living people or those whose immediate descendants were still living.

We are used now to seeing the present British royal family portrayed on film and stage – Helen Mirren has cornered today’s market for Queen Elizabeth II. Yet around the time the current Queen was crowned, the Lord Chamberlain was regularly banning the presentation of Queen Victoria on stage, while any inclusion of the reigning monarch in a drama was unthinkable. The Lord Chamberlain’s censorship continued right up to the abolition of his powers in 1968. One of the last plays to be banned from public performance featured Queen Victoria having a lesbian affair with Florence Nightingale. That play can now be performed legally of course, but it hasn’t yet been turned into an opera…

What are your favourite depictions of royalty on stage?

More about the presentation of monarchy in drama can be read in the article ‘We Three Queens’ in the programme that accompanies Gloriana.